In a Facebook post, Phoebe Tickell asked

Polycrisis / metacrisis is a rediscovery of Wicked Problems (1973) and VUCA (1987). What else are these terms adding?

Phoebe Tickell https://www.facebook.com/phoebetickell/posts/pfbid02VRBbiVQPWS7bvbik6Qvjx8xhTa5Vn6ApbZQFuVF7zfAmyfcdbth9UZxypJ6K97Uyl

My answer is below

My answer:

These are all just words therefore subject to over-familiarisation, co-option by the existing paradigm and by chancers and the innocent, and general misuse and abuse.

But… it would IMO be perfectly reasonable to say:

– Wicked Problems were a way of defining specific criteria of *problems* (and problems in *planning*, originally), which involved people, politics, and which from the perspective of planning appeared irresoluble and met a clustered set of criteria, and called for a specific type of approach to them. (Not a million miles from Ackoff’s ‘messes’, of course).

– VUCA relations to *conditions* – initially on a battlefield, if I understand correctly, then in the competitive and general environment of a business. It embeds its own specific criteria and is context specific.

(There’s also TUNA from Rafael Ramirez relating specifically to scenario planning and futures – Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, and Ambiguous – I prefer this to VUCA for a number of reasons)

– Then the ‘poly crisis’ relates to a usually non-specific set of globally interacting crises which do inter-relate in truly complex ways, with the main implication being that it seeps into all contexts and is in a sense inescapable.

There’s some implication in the polycrisis (and explicitly in the problematised ‘meta-crisis’, which I think is potentially an argument for that term being useful and making a meaningful distinction) that it brings in ‘sensemaking’ in terms of our own way of understanding and responding to all the elements of the polycrisis and to them as a whole. There’s a sensible multi-layer point to make that if *not only* are we unable to cope with the polycrisis, we’re also unable to orientate ourselves to it in any meaningful way, and our very orientation to the problem becomes a problem. That seems to me to be a meaningful distinction.

– you’ve left out ‘the World Problematique’ https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803124817999;jsessionid=9367733DD4AF0A3EBCF74C658ABC0522 from the Club of Rome which is a set of (fairly comprehensive) specific interlocking wicked problems which interact to form a polycrisis… though again, it might be reasonable to say that the Club of Rome occasionally veered into a mechanistic worldview or over-simplifying to try to achieve change (hence, for example, removing water cycles from the modelling of the climate crisis, leaving us with the fixation on carbon). So this seems to definitely have been an early version of the ‘polycrisis’ though it was more focused and less implying infinite ramification into all spheres including the social and mental – just total world collapse 🙂

So in my mind if we want to make a useful differentiation, we can go:

• Wicked problems a special class of problem in planning (planning in the broadest sense of making plans, but also specifically in land use and social planning)
• Messes a special class of problem in primarily business-related categories
• VUCA a context in a contested space (battlefield or business)
• TUNA a context we encounter in our attempts to meet with the future
• World Problematique – specific problems (that might be defined as Wicked) interrelating in a way inescapable to our living of our lives (all-encompassing context)
• Poly-crisis – non-specific problems, many of them wicked, interrelating in a way that intimately impacts the living of all our lives
• Meta-crisis – the poly-crisis problematising the way we make sense of the poly-crisis

I could quibble with all of these – e.g. wicked problems do contain elements of sense-making being problematised, at the least from multiple social perspectives – but I do think these are helpful and defensible differentiations. That’s because all these definitions come with some meaningful definition of:

• A *context* in which they can be meaningfully defined (planning, business, contested space etc)
• A *purpose* or intent which we have which is interlocked with the context (successful planning, winning, etc)

We are too often guilty, IMO, of using these terms and talking in general about the experience of confronting ‘complexity’ etc without explaining the factors which generate complexity, which are all due to interaction and contextualisation agent and context:

Intent, framing, perspective, interpretation, ability, learning, history, understanding etc etc.

(Which in practice usually means we have one context in mind but accidentally or intentionally are not disclosing it to others, because it’s obvious to us).

The problems with leaving these parts out are:

1. We falsely give the impression that the ‘problem’ is inherent in the world (the problem is never inherent in the world), cutting off most of the sense-making potential
2. We prevent people from making the useful distinctions to tailor their approach in different contexts of engagement
3. We allow people to simply describe their understanding of the problem then receive back a version of that purporting to confirm that this is ontologically true

I once had a split with a collaborator because they insisted that, in the era of the climate crisis, *everything* just *was* a Wicked Problem. I was perfectly happy to concede that that was a valid way of looking and everything you did (in business, the unspoken, assumed context) could and probably should be related to the climate crisis, but that wasn’t enough for them… but in my opinion approaching *everything* as a wicked problem (what does that even mean?) would be a huge mistake.

As soon as you ask ‘what does that even mean?’ with regard to ‘*everything* is a wicked problem’, you get into the more useful conversation: ‘is brushing your teeth a wicked problem?’ opens up a proper conversation about relationships to contexts etc. But killing off that conversation before it even starts is, to me… a problem.